When advising politically-inclined students – and working at a DC based
academic research institute and Public Policy department ensures I have
many of these – I often counsel them to eschew electoral politics
entirely, to approach policy careers with managed and severely
constrained expectations about the results they can expect to achieve,
and to generally shed the instinctual habits of activism. To the
politically enthused and – more so – the idealist who seeks to better
the world in which he or she lives, this message is both exceedingly
difficult to receive and counter-intuitive to almost everything they've
been brought up to believe about democracy, participatory government,
and attaining social change.